Fusion is a tricky thing.

Sometimes, it’s a disaster – a whirlwind culinary world tour that leaves you wondering, “Was udon noodles and feta with a deconstructed Moroccan mint ‘salsa,’ turnip-soy foam and habanero-laced cr?me fraiche really such a good idea?” It wasn’t.

Sometimes, it works. Case in point: a Maine “lobster roll,” served maki-style rather than in a hot dog bun, with lemon thyme sticky rice, pea shoots and drawn butter. The drawn butter is arbitrary, but the rest of it, including the tangerine-orange fused-glass plate on which it is served, is artful.

Given the setting, that’s no surprise.

The Gallery Caf? at Prismglass Studio & Gallery in Rockport serves up fusion of a different sort – that of art and cuisine. Here, you can experience food that’s complex but not obnoxiously so, visit a gallery full of fragile, often gravity-defying sculptures and jewelry made of glass, and watch resident glassblower Patti Kissinger work her magic before or after your meal.

“A lot of glassblowers refer to it as a dance because you’re moving constantly and your timing needs to be perfect,” Kissinger, 51, says in her studio as she dips a long, hollow metal rod into a vat of molten glass.

She emerges with a glowing ball and immediately starts twirling it. Still twirling, she raises the rod, which looks like a giant, orange Q-tip, to her lips and gives it a hard puff. The ball expands slowly. She moves toward the crucible, still twirling, and gathers another layer of glass.

Kissinger sits down, flicks on a blowtorch and reheats the glass, then she rolls it in a pile of small purple glass shards, called frill. She steps away, puffs again, twirls and drops the ball into a metal mold that looks like a daisy. The ball, which will become a vase, emerges from the mold with raised ribs.

Wearing a helmet – Kissinger once caught her hair on fire – she works without pause, twirling and dipping and torching and pulling and cutting until the vase is ready to cool in the kiln. It’s hot, physically demanding work, and Kissinger has outfitted her studio so she can work without an assistant, virtually unheard of among women glassblowers.

“I assist Patti occasionally, but I stay out of the hot shop,” said Kissinger’s business partner, Lisa Sojka, 41. “I worked as a chef for years.”

And that’s where the glass and the food come together. For 13 years, the duo ran a pair of large, successful glass galleries in Nashville, Tenn. Kissinger, whose background is in architectural stained glass, learned how to blow glass from one of the visiting artists there six years ago.

“Patti still does stained glass, but she’s picky,” Sojka said. “She likes working with people who really want something that’s a piece of art. She really gets into something different, something a little more meaningful. In Nashville, it was very materialistic.”

The business was a success, but they were ready for a change. After Sept. 11, 2001, they closed one of their galleries and, in 2003, they decided to move.

“We hopped in the car, took our 13-year-old Dalmatian, borrowed my parents’ motor home and said, ‘OK, we’re going to go find a state,'” Sojka said.

They considered Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but ultimately they decided to head north.

“Nothing was fitting,” Sojka said. “We got up here to Scarborough and thought, ‘This is kind of cool. I like this kind of feel.’ We went up here, hit Rockland and never left.”

They lingered at a campground, searching for possible studio spaces, when a Cape that formerly housed a restaurant on Route 1 became available. It was quite a bit smaller than their 5,000-square-foot space in Nashville, but they managed to carve out a series of galleries to showcase the work of 50 glass artists from across the country.

They also had room for a restaurant, but while Lisa formerly worked as a chef at a Mobil four-diamond country inn in Pennsylvania and at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, she had no desire to cook here.

“My background is food,” Sojka said. “I had gone into the glass business with Patti. I was just really glad I didn’t have to be the chef.”

At first, they didn’t give the food side a lot of thought – they were focused on building a hot shop for Patti in the building’s back yard because they had two semis full of furnaces, showcases and personal items coming up from Tennessee. They figured they’d serve breakfast and lunch. Then chef Tim Pierre Labonte arrived.

Labonte, a 31-year-old Augusta native, was working in Key West, looking for a way to return to Maine. A friend told him about Prismglass, and he decided to bring his Caribbean-influenced cuisine to the Midcoast. In Rockport, he has cultivated relationships with local farmers, fishermen and foragers to ensure a fresh, seasonal menu.

“It’s all in the seasons and the weather,” Labonte, a Johnson & Wales grad, said recently as the lunch crowd started to dissipate. “Spring brings new life and growth, and growth inspires a chef. … It’s my favorite time of year. You have wild mushrooms, wild leeks, fiddleheads, rhubarb. Everything is so abundant this time of year. With that in mind, you only have a month and a half to take advantage of these things.”

And he does. The season’s bounty appears in such dishes as saffron-basted king salmon over caramelized onion fondue and asparagus, served with a fiddlehead fern salad. At lunchtime, pea shoots accent a grilled manchego and provolone sandwich. And an amuse bouche of fresh, warm morel mushrooms hints at what’s to come.

“The first thing that comes through is flavor,” Labonte said. “You’ve got to make sure the flavor’s there. And it’s equally important to have a nice presentation of those flavors, but I feel you’ve got to start with the flavor first.”

His humbly named tiramisu pudding arrives at the table in a martini glass, a layer of sweet marsala risotto pudding concealing a nugget of espresso-soaked ladyfinger. A thin layer of tarragon oil adds a fresh taste and a flash of green to the dessert, followed by a dollop of mascarpone cheese and curls of white and dark chocolate. The whole thing is topped off with a wedge of white chocolate printed with black music notes. It’s a thing of beauty, to be sure. But it tastes good, too.

“I like to deconstruct and reconstruct,” Labonte said. “Even a little element of surprise can turn an ordinary meal into something extraordinary – give it a little wow factor.”

And if the tiramisu doesn’t wow you, the glass will – whether you’re eating off one of Kissinger’s handmade plates or watching her turn molten glass into a work of art.

Now that’s fusion.

Prismglass Studio & Gallery and the Gallery Caf? are located at 297 Commercial St. in Rockport. Call 230-0061 and visit www.prismgallery.com. Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.